CRM evolution 2017 – Customer Experience via AI

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 28, 2017 | Blog |

Just on may way back from CRM evolution 2017 it is time for a little recap. The conference, once more chaired by CRM Grandmaster Paul Greenberg, was again co-located with sister conferences Customer Service Experience and Speechtek. Why there is a separate – and smaller – conference for Customer Services co-located with a CRM conference is beyond me, as Customer Service is an integral part of CRM. But be it as it is. CRM Evolution attracted around 500 professionals, being second to Speechtek. The main topics this year seemed to be Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, and AI, nothing of this coming as a surprise. The size ratio of the conferences and the topics were also confirmed by the exhibitors in the Customer Solutions Expo. We saw an abundance of little booths with AI- and bot-vendors. The mainstays of CRM had fairly small presences, notably SugarCRM, which had a big presence last year. Both keynotes dealt with delivering to maximize customer experience and to measure the result. In the opening keynote Gerry McGovern answered the question what great customer experience is in a digital world and then how to measure it. His premise is that customers want to get something done and that it therefore is imperative to help them getting it done as fast and easy as possible. That begins with page load times, goes on with simple check-out processes like Amazon’s famous one-click or Uber’s payment process – hint there is none at the end of the ride. Things are as easy as saying good-bye to the driver and opening the door. Throughout his keynote Gerry made the...

Content Management Systems – The Secret of Great CustServ

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 31, 2017 | Blog |

Today’s customer service requirements are getting ever more complicated for businesses. Customers encountering problems increasingly rely on self-help. Customers may start looking for solutions by searching on Google, on community sites, or inside a mobile app. A logical starting point depends on the device and application, as well as personal preferences. The bottom line is: customers want to get to their solution as quickly and easily as possible, and they do not want to change their habits and preferences in order to reach support. Many companies run several customer service applications that support different channels, each with a separate knowledge base (KB) subsystem. These may include a support application for an ecommerce site, some general help pages on the company web site, and FAQs on a mobile application. For internal purposes, there might even be an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system with information for contact agents to use but that are not published externally. Of course the normal situation for a service agent is to work on more than one channel. This means that depending on the nature of the inquiry, agents need to use and update multiple knowledge bases. This results in additional, redundant work and information. Furthermore, information gets easily out of sync—resulting in confusion. Similarly, customers need to navigate through different knowledge bases and FAQs. Apart from being highly inefficient and ineffective, this has an impact on both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. It leads to frustration because customers who do not find their solution need to relay the same information multiple times, and they could be put on hold while the agents research different databases,...

DRU Assist – A Customer Experience

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 30, 2017 | Blog |

A few weeks ago Domino’s Pizza announced that they introduced conversational AI capabilities in their ordering process to enhance the customer experience. DRU Assist, a Virtual Assistant that is powered by Nuance Technology’s Nina Intelligent Virtual Assistant technology. Of course that caught my interest, looking at AI, chatbots and Virtual Assistants for some time now from a customer experience angle. I believe that there is quite some potential in Virtual Assistants although I saw and still see some risks for customer experience in using them. Used in a wrong way, raising too high expectations that subsequently are not fulfilled, bots can kill the user experience. The doubts I expressed earlier are still there but then I am happy to be convinced otherwise. Domino’s managed a tremendous turnaround after having some serious issues late in the aughties and early tens. Apart from rediscovering quality they implemented a very strong technology strategy that helps them understanding their customers better and helps their customers to a pretty smooth ordering and delivery process. The Intention So, I took the chance to have a conversation with Nuance’s Robert Schwarz about DRU assist, and of course ordered some Pizza using DRU shortly after it came online in New Zealand. Having some Pizza-loving children and a busy lifestyle I am a frequent mobile customer of Domino’s (and no, they didn’t incentivize me for this article in any form). Unluckily I couldn’t get statements from Domino’s, but here we are … Nuance as a vendor has a long history in speech-based interfaces. According to Mr. Schwarz Nina, the Nuance technology behind DRU Assist is really good at...

CXM! What the Heck is That?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 19, 2017 | Blog |

In his recent very readable article ‘iCXM Comes of Age – Using AI to Know, Engage, and Server Your Customers Better’, CustomerThink.com founder and chief editor Bob Thompson explored how Artificial Intelligence can improve Customer Experience Management – and with extending CXM to iCXM created a new acronym, jokingly noting that the industry is running short on buzzwords. The opportunities that Bob identifies are Knowing your customer Engaging your customer Serving your customer While this is all true, I contend that none of this is about customer experience management, simply because customer experiences are living in the perception of the customer, and hence are solely managed by the customer, not by any company. I wrote about it earlier in my article There is no customer experience without customer engagement. According to Wikipedia, customer experience ‘is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences … ‘. Therefore customer experience ‘implies customer involvement at different levels – such as rational, emotional, sensorial, physical, and spiritual. Customers respond diversely to direct and indirect contact with a company.’ Lastly, customer experience ‘can be defined as the internal and personal responses of the customers …”. A company, supported by the software it uses, can engage customers in a way that these customers have a positive – or negative – experience. What now is customer experience management? Friend and CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg, in a seminal article clarified on the definitions of...

Customers dump Businesses for poor Service? Yeah, Right!

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 1, 2017 | Blog |

Good customer service, customer experience and customer experience management are all about technology and its right use. This is what many of the articles that one could read on various platforms can make one think. Just that it isn’t. I guess I contributed my share to this misconception, too. My excuse is that I am a techie by trade and at heart. Sure, technology is a part of delivering a good customer experience but there is much more to it. Technology enables the digital presence of a business and helps its employees delivering better experiences – if available and used. But delivering a good customer experience first and foremost involves people, then policy and process. Technology is the last priority contributing, it is an enabler, a means to an end – not the end itself. On the other hand there are reports over reports saying that customers stop doing business with a company after bad experiences, sometimes even after a single bad experience, e.g. shocking 89 per cent according the 2011 Rightnow Customer Experience Report, or 62 per cent according to the 2015 Parature Global Customer Service Report. The 2016 Institute of Customer Service UK Customer Satisfaction Index finds that most UK customers want a balance of price and service, given there is a minimum service level. And the list goes on and on. While all these statistics likely have some grain of truth there are also numerous examples of poor customer experience not having a detrimental impact on a company. This is probably in part due to who asked the question, how the question was asked; this often...